Science and technology

21st-century statecraft

Cold-war nostalgia

EVGENY MOROZOV is grumpy again. After a hiatus at his Net Effect blog for Foreign Policy, he announced "I'm back but the internet still sucks", arguing that it's difficult to take people seriously when they compare Google to Andrei Sakharov, since Sakharov didn't sell ad words in his quest for democracy. This morning at 3:19 am EST, he offered an instruction manual: How to become an internet freedom warrior.

Go visit the usual think-tanks in search of aging conservatives who feel nostalgic for the last years of the Reagan Administration. Begin by telling them how much you appreciate their (otherwise non-existent) role in ending the Soviet Union by smuggling a bunch of Xerox machines. Practice your rudimentary Polish and Hungarian. Hold their hands and salute Reagan's bust on their table. Proceed to enlighten them about blogs, tweets, and social networks. Watch their faces light up when they grasp the full implications of what you are saying. Surprise them by announcing that Cold War is now officialy back in town.

Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world's networks. They've expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech. These actions contravene the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which tells us that all people have the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” With the spread of these restrictive practices, a new information curtain is descending across much of the world. And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.

I'm not as dyspeptic about it as Mr Morozov (who is?) but I have to admit that I'm nonplussed by the idea of 21st-century statecraft. I'm not sure whether it's meant to be a kind of digital Radio Free Europe, or a digital USAID. Is America using the internet to encourage people to embrace the values of democracy and freedom of speech? Or does it want to drive development, to help people create their own economic stability? These are two fundamentally different goals, but both show up in threads of Ms Clinton's speech. What Mr Morozov nails, though, is the cold-war nostalgia that that has inflated this debate. A wall is a useful metaphor: the West is on one side, being free. On the other side are people who yearn also to be free. All the West needs to do, then, is to tell the people on the other side of the wall how great being free is.

The problem is that by adopting the Cold War's clarity of purpose, Ms Clinton is falling into some of its traps. Radio Free Europe, at its inception, was funded largely by the CIA. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it does point to the difficulty of disentangling state-sponsored intellectual freedom from state-sponsored propaganda. If a state provides the physical means of free communication (broadcast towers in the cold war, proxy servers now), it's difficult to resist the temptation of spoiling that freedom with the state's own message, however well-intentioned. And this matters; dissidents seen as too close to America lose their authority. Mr Morozov has pointed out in the past that it was a mistake for the State Department to publicly ask Twitter to delay its scheduled maintenance during the election protests in Iran last summer; this gave the Iranian government leverage to claim that Twitter was just an American tool for destabilising Iran.

Readers' comments

"Is America using the internet to encourage people to embrace the values of democracy and freedom of speech? Or does it want to drive development, to help people create their own economic stability? These are two fundamentally different goals, but both show up in threads of Ms Clinton's speech."

One of the things that always disappoints me is how often these goals are conflated. I agree they are separate. But it is disturbingly common that people talk of, and possibly think of, these goals as being pretty much exactly the same thing.